Review: Blobs Show Plenty of Personality

Video-game companies are always trying to impress us with flashier graphics. As game consoles grow more sophisticated, designers are always finding new ways to make the virtual world look more like the real world _ and make virtual characters look more human. Thats great for an immersive role-playing epic like"The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion"or a dramatic war game like"Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter."But a lot of our favorite games are completely unrealistic and manage to be enormously entertaining despite less than state-of-the-art graphics. Who needs a finely detailed human avatar when you can have just as much fun with a low-res cartoon like Mario? Who says a hero has to be humanoid at all? Theres a long tradition of video-game stars _ guys like Pac-Man, Q bert and Kirby _ who are little more than blobs with eyeballs.

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